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Dr. Timothy Harlan is a practicing, board-certified internist, and is also medical director of outpatient clinics, associate chief of general internal medicine, and assistant clinical professor of medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has had a path to medicine that encompasses an interest in nutrition and its profound effect on health.

Dr. Harlan's love of food began as a teenager working in the restaurant business. Starting as a dishwasher, he worked his way up to managing his first restaurant by the age of eighteen. Along the way he learned to cook, and at age 22 opened his own restaurant, which he operated for three years before returning to school to complete an undergraduate degree at Emory University and medical school at the Emory University School of Medicine. While in school, he worked as a caterer and continued to be involved with food and cooking, and noticed a lack of knowledge in the medical field about eating healthy and eating well.

Since patients were usually told what they could not eat, rather than what they could eat, Dr. Harlan wrote It's Heartly Fare, a food manual for patients with cardiovascular disease, now in its fifth printing. His latest book, Hand on Heart, is published by ENDpapers publishing.

Dr. Harlan has been an on-air consultant to the TV Food Network show Cooking Thin and a host on the DIY Network show AskDIY. In 2002, Dr. Harlan's public television program, the Dr. Gourmet Show, won an Emmy award.